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AROUND THE QUADSColleagues Support Bollinger's Position Against Israli Boycott
“Boycott us,” President Lee C. Bollinger told leaders of Britain’s UCU in a position that has gained widespread support among his peers. Photo: Bill Wood 
Nearly 300 college and university presidents around the country have endorsed a statement by President Lee C. Bollinger denouncing an effort by Britain’s primary faculty union to have professors boycott Israeli academics and cultural institutions. Britain ’s 120,000-member University and College Union had urged its members against “participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation” with Israeli institutions for what the UCU called their complicity with the “colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, which is based on Zionist ideology.” Bollinger was among the first in academia to denounce this effort, doing so in a June 12 statement that read: “I find this idea utterly antithetical to the fundamental values of the academy, where we will not hold the intellectual exchange hostage to the political disagreements of the moment … At Columbia, I am proud to say that we embrace Israeli scholars and universities that the UCU is now all too eager to isolate — as we embrace scholars from many countries regardless of divergent views on their governments’ policies. “Therefore, if the British UCU is intent on pursuing its deeply misguided policy, then it should add Columbia to its boycott list, for we do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you are seeking to punish. Boycott us, then, for we gladly stand together with our many colleagues in British, American and Israeli universities against such intellectually shoddy and politically biased attempts to hijack the central mission of higher education.” Since then, 51 Nobel laureates, led by author Elie Wiesel, denounced the UCU position, and the presidents and chancellors of eight schools circulated a letter authored by Bollinger along with a petition sponsored by the American Jewish Committee headlined “Boycott Israeli Universities? Boycott Ours, Too!” The petition, signed by 286 presidents of American colleges and universities who were listed in a full-page advertisement in the August 8 edition of The New York Times, read in part, “In seeking to quarantine Israeli universities and scholars, this vote threatens every university committed to fostering scholarly and cultural exchanges that lead to enlightenment, empathy, and a much-needed international marketplace of ideas.”
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